ON a scale of one to 10, “The Science of Sleep” rates about an H. Watching it is like being the only non-stoned person in the room as someone tells a long, long story.

This film might be brilliant if you happen to be non-non-stoned, but at the screening room where I saw it they wouldn’t even let me bring in a coffee. Which I really needed. Stéphane (Gael Garcia Bernal), a frustrated young artist, moves into his mother’s Paris apartment after the death of his father. He takes a dull job printing calendars and sleeps in his tiny childhood bed.

He wants to be an inventor: He has this cool idea for a pair of glasses that will show you what the world looks like in 3-D.

Disoriented by his father’s death and the dull job, where he wants to market a calendar in which each month celebrates a different historical disaster – July is the TWA 800 crash – Stéphane begins to mix up dreams and reality, and so does writer-director Michel Gondry’s movie, which fragments into dream-shards: Stéphane analyzing his past in a child’s TV studio with cardboard cameras; Stéphane in the office as buildings collapse like illustrations in a pop-up book; Stéphane sautéing a photo of his dad.

His mirror image is his neighbor Stéphanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who collects misfit stuffed animals. Her friend Zoe tries to set them up, which encourages him. But in a liquid haze, he writes Stéphanie a note: “I Am Just Your Neighbor and a Liar. By the Way, Do You Have Zoe’s Number?” He dreams that he slips it under her door, but in reality he recovers the note with the aid of a coathanger. He’s pretty sure of that, anyway.

The movie does have a dreamlike quality. But it’s like one of those dreams where you’re late for work and you can’t find your shoes. Gondry, who directed “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and the music video that rebuilt the White Stripes out of Legos, has to put his thoughts into something more organized.

He doesn’t, because he is still thinking like a video director: He establishes a cool mood with a handful of surreal setups that he keeps in rotation, with diminishing value at each spin. Mood doesn’t keep you going for 106 minutes.

When Stéphane declares, “Death to organization,” Gondry is saying, “I don’t need to tell a story.”

The cheap stop-motion animation – part Cahiers du Cinema, part claymation – is refreshingly ragged. There are many flickers of sweetness, such as when Stéphane presents Stéphanie with a “time machine” that zips them both three seconds into the future. He immediately kisses her twice. The second time, he says, was the present.

But consuming this feast of images starts to hit you like tryptophan. Stéphane seems less like an artist than a madman, and the idea of people driven mad by their obsessions with their dreams was explored to far more moving effect in the Wim Wenders film “Until the End of the World.”

“The Science of Sleep” isn’t really about dreams but about childhood, in all its solipsism and wonder. Bernal plays the role as a puppy-eyed 6-year-old, and during a fight, Stéphanie shouts, “Get out, or I’ll call your mother!” Like a little kid, the film begs us to listen when its real problem is that it can’t articulate its thoughts.